Easy Mode vs. Hard Mode: Positioning Yourself to Win

I’m Melissa Shanahan, and this is The Law Firm Owner Podcast Episode #296. 

Welcome to The Law Firm Owner Podcast, powered by Velocity Work, for owners who want to grow a firm that gives them the life they want. Get crystal clear on where you're going, take planning seriously, and honor your plan like a pro. This is the work that creates Velocity.

Hey everyone. Welcome to this week's episode. Today, we are going to talk about a concept, a framework that is very much in line with Velocity Work, what we stand for. You know, in order to do the work that creates velocity, it is important to know what you're aiming for. It is important to make a plan to align yourself to what you're aiming for. And it's important to honor the plan.

If one of those three things is missing, you're gonna experience more friction. And this framework is really about taking control in ways that you can, that people sometimes sit back and they don't take the reins where they could take the reins. Not in a way where you're just trying to control every element of the journey. No, but you're taking control over the things you actually have control over.

Now, this concept I'm going to share with you today, I read in Clear Thinking, which is Shane Parrish's book. He writes a lot about mental models and I deeply appreciate his perspectives and the way that he shares information. It's very much in line with how I think and why I started this company. And so it resonates a lot. And because of that, I want to share it here because it's just a different way of saying some of the same concepts that we have talked about before.

So this concept today that I'm going to share with you in hopes of providing you a different lens to look at the type of work that we do, what we at Velocity Work say matters, there's different lenses you can look through to see what really matters and to wrap your head around what really matters and be able to implement what really matters.

So I think part of my job is to continue to bring information that is meaningful, that will be useful to you, to you in different ways. Making sure that I'm saying things in different ways so that it lands somehow, some way for some of you out there. One of the ways that I share, it will land and it will be something, whatever you take away will be something that matters for you and your firm. It will make a difference. So that's today. It's not really new concepts, but there is some new language I'm gonna introduce today and there are some different ways of thinking about the concept I'm gonna talk about today that I haven't shared before. So with that, let's dig in.

The concept I'm gonna talk to you today about is positioning. Positioning yourself for success. Positioning yourself to win at whatever game you are playing. And all too often we do not position ourselves to win. And when we do not do the things that will position us to be successful with the things that we care about, with the things that we want to be successful in, or we want to make a change in, if we don't position ourselves well to line up with those things, then that means we are playing on hard mode. If we do position ourselves well to line up with those things, it means we're playing on easy mode.

So I want you to keep that in mind the whole time during this episode today. This is really about easy mode or hard mode and you get to choose. A lot of people, they don't realize that they have choices. They're not awake to that. But this episode, I think will help you maybe wake up in ways that you haven't yet around opportunities that you have to position yourself well.

So let's start with the two types of positioning. There is optionality and there's preparation. So let's start with optionality. Optionality is preparing yourself for an uncertain future. So it's for something that the opportunity hasn't even presented itself yet, but you are preparing so that when an opportunity presents you can strike. That is optionality. It's basically you are doing what it takes. You're positioning yourself well so that when an opportunity arises, you have options.

The other type of positioning is preparation. Preparation is when you are preparing and positioning yourself for what you know is coming. This could be an important date, you know, like an event of some sort. If you think about students, it could be a test or a quiz. It could be about a presentation that you need to give. It could be a date that you're going on. It could be, you could look at anything. The first day for a new hire in your firm, positioning yourself well for the outcome you're looking for is really important. So you may be thinking, okay, well, how do you do that?

Give us the juice, Melissa. But here's what I want to say. Again, go back to hard mode versus easy mode. Easy mode means you have done the things to make success inevitable. Hard mode means you may still be successful, but it will not be because you positioned yourself well for it. It'll be because of brute force, and likely that will be a subpar outcome versus if you were positioning yourself well for success, if you were prepared, right? So easy mode versus hard mode.

I want you to remember that the whole episode. What you can do today that will make tomorrow easier, that is playing on easy mode. If you do not do today, what would make tomorrow easier, you are playing on hard mode. Now, sometimes it feels very hard to do easy mode. Sometimes you don't feel like doing today what will make tomorrow easier. But this is really where we've talked so much about this on the podcast. This is about delaying gratification. That is a skill. It is a meta skill.

And so even though this idea may sound very appealing that I'm talking to you about today, this idea of positioning and yeah, why don't I position myself to play on easy mode versus hard mode? The reason people don't do it is because they will not override their default brain patterns. They will not take a minute to just pause and have a look at the situation and think clearly about what they want. Not what they feel like doing in the moment, what they want.

And when you can decide to maybe experience some discomfort now to do what will line you up with what you ultimately want, that is delaying gratification. The alternative, because there's always going to be a hard part of this, The alternative is that you give in to the urge to not do the thing that you said you would do. That it would put you on easy mode, but you're not going to do it.

So you are not delaying gratification because what you're doing in that moment is giving in to the urge that is happening within that says, I don't feel like doing it right now. There's always going to be an urge to get away from the discomfort of doing the thing you don't want to do, to experience some sort of relief. You will back off and you will not do what technically you could do right now to make tomorrow easier. And we all do this. We are human.

This is part of the human experience. But concepts like this, the more deeply you understand concepts like we're talking about today, it does create an easier shift in moments when you understand how this is all at play, how this all works, what you can do, where can you take the reins. When you don't take the reins, why are you being curious about why you're not taking the reins.

That's why I'm a huge fan of these concepts because you can use this knowledge. It's not just a knowledge problem. If it was just a knowledge problem, everybody do everything right. But you can use this knowledge to deepen your experience of your own behavior. And you can start to be more objective. You can start to witness your behavior and say, you know what, wait a minute, I have an opportunity here to tomorrow play on easy mode or play on hard mode.

And if you're going to choose to play on hard mode tomorrow because you're not going to choose to do today what could make tomorrow easier, that is okay. For real, I'm saying that. It really is okay. There's no point in having any judgment on it. But what is important is that you are honest about it.

So if you are not going to do what you said, what you could do to make tomorrow easier, then you just have to recognize that the truth is that you are making a statement for hard mode. You are saying, raising your hand, I am going to do hard mode tomorrow. And at some point, you'll get sick of telling yourself that and you'll get sick of the way it feels to constantly be on hard mode.

And even if it's just with one area of your life, one discipline. You're always on hard mode, but if you're really honest about it and you say those words, you don't just say, I don't feel like it tonight. No, no, no, make yourself say, tonight I'm choosing hard mode for tomorrow. Just do that, because that's honest, and then you can do something with it.

You may make that statement every night or every day about this thing that you are just not getting there, you're just not there. At the moment, you are not ready to choose to do the thing that would put you on easy mode or let you play on easy mode, and that you can work with.

This is a lot like Monday Map, by the way, this is partially why I love this. I'm deep in doing the third edition of Monday Map to be even more useful and helpful for people. And so this is particularly interesting for me because of how well the concepts line up.

One of the greatest things that comes out of Monday Map is how honest you have to be with what is on your plate. People think all the time they're just going to get a bunch of stuff done in the week. They have this to-do list that maybe lives in their head, maybe some of it lives in a task management system, maybe some of it lives in Post-its. I don't know. There's a bunch of things that we all have to do in every week. But if you're not really organized about it and you don't actually put in the calendar when you're going to do these things, then you are just haphazardly flying at it, trying to get as much done as you possibly can in a week and never getting it all done. And you never were going to get it all done.

Somehow, there was some little hope that you were going to get more than what you got done. And when it doesn't happen time and time and time again, people begin to feel very defeated. I have been here before. This is part of the reason I'm so passionate about teaching Monday Map.

When you are in that cycle, when you are living in that paradigm, it is very difficult to get yourself out of it and it's because of what's happening in your brain. Your brain is literally thinking things like, I can't get ahead, I don't have enough time for all of this, I can't handle all the work I have to do, I'm always behind, any of that stuff, my help that I have isn't that great. Whatever it is that's running through your head, that is a paradigm that you're living in. And the only thing that will shift you out of that paradigm is to change your relationship to the work. Change, like fundamentally flip on its head how you've been approaching the work.

It hasn't been working and the reason it hasn't been working is because you can't possibly take the reins where you have an opportunity to take the reins. You can't possibly take them. You just keep telling yourself that you're just going to go at everything.

Taking the reins is taking stock. Taking the reins is having a look at all the things you need to do and actually slating time for them. And whereas things don't fit, you take the reins again and you figure out what to do with those things. It really is about getting this honest and when you hide behind generalities and massive to-do lists with no sense of timeframes on them, you don't know how many minutes it's going to take for these things. If you really add it up all the time it's going to take for all the work that you say you're gonna get done in a week, it would be very clear to you that that is hogwash.

And then you're gonna have to figure something else out, which means maybe you reset expectations of people, Maybe it means that you decide to work more that week. You get to decide, but you can't decide anything if you aren't looking at the facts.

So Monday Map is a process that helps you play on easy mode, but it is work. You have to sit down and you have to do the work and you have to follow a process and not follow it perfectly, but you have to go through it. And when you go through that process, it makes the next week easier to blow your own mind with what you can get done to really be productive and really set yourself up for success and really make sure that the expectations of those around you whether personal or whether professional are set according to reality.

So Monday Map is a way to play on easy mode. It does not mean it's an easy thing to do, but it is a worthwhile thing to do because it puts you on easy mode. It positions you. You position yourself in a way to experience more flow, get more done, reduce distractions, and win your week.

There's a few other more specific kinds of positioning that Shane Parrish talks about, so I'm going to touch on them here because I do think it's good to consider these. One is relationship positioning. He mentions that there are four permutations of every relationship. Win-win, win-lose, lose-win, lose-lose. And win-win is what you always should be shooting for in relationship. And this can be with team members, this can be with a spouse or a significant other, this could be with a client, any relationship. Think about your positioning in that relationship.

When you do what's in your control, you put yourself on easy mode. So now if you reflect on a personal relationship that you have, that's important to you and to your firm, how can you apply the win-win positioning to strengthen this relationship? What specific actions could you take to ensure that this relationship is positioned for long-term success? Is it a win-win?

I talk a lot about win-win scenarios inside of Velocity Work because what's important is that anything that we help a client implement, it needs to be a win-win-win. We say this all the time. It needs to be a win for the firm. It needs to be a win for the client. And it needs to be a win for the team. Firm and team people sometimes get those mixed up, but the firm is its own business entity. The culture within it is very different.

So I just like to think about how can with anything we do, everybody wins. That is why we are doing it. We have checked the boxes. We have seen how this is going to affect positively all three. And if we are going to put forth something that only affects one or two of the three, then we can find a different way that actually checks all three boxes. So let's do that.

So this win-win relationship is pretty great to think about because when you do think in this way, you will get ideas that are not hard, but line you up to strengthen the relationship so that it really is a win-win for both sides. So that is one.

And you know, if you think about being in a win-win relationship, it means that you are never beating somebody over the head to get them to do what you want them to do. It means you're never taking the last scraps of a business deal. It means that you are rooting for success of others. That is win-win.

And when you approach your relationships like that, even though we think, yeah, of course you want to approach your relationships like that, but we are careless sometimes with those relationships closest to us. Or in many instances, we are careless with the relationships that are on the periphery. They would actually, there's a win-win there to be met. If we just positioned ourselves differently, everybody wins. So this can be a great one to think about, especially as business owner.

There's two more. Another positioning type is reputation positioning. And this one I love. One of my strengths- if you've listened to Tara Gronhovd on our podcast- she has done our strengths with our team. And one of mine is futuristic. And because that's one of my strengths, my head is constantly thinking about reputation and I innately do what I can, not that I can't do better, but I innately position myself well, reputationally, because it just matters so deeply to me. But your reputation is, it's that hidden force that whispers in others' ears before you meet them. So the exceptional reputation can get you opportunities. And so how can you position yourself well, reputationally?

The last form of positioning that I read from Shane Parish is mental positioning. This is the books you read, it's the people you hang out with, it's the social media following and engagement that you take part in. It's the quality of the information that you let in. The information that you consume will determine how you are thinking. It will determine your future thoughts. You are giving yourself inputs to process and when you do that and they are low quality, you are going to end up with lower quality thoughts. Lower quality future thoughts.

So if we are trying to position ourselves well from a mindset perspective, it would behoove us all to audit our inputs. Audit what we are consuming. The quality of your inputs determine the quality of the results that you create in your world. So having a look at what maybe needs to be cleared out. I do this every so often on social media. I clear a bunch of just noise out. It's not even necessarily negative. I don't follow negative stuff. I don't really deal with that. But even just noise, it's too much.

If you wanna crank up your output, you have to decrease your input. There are times when that's not the season you're in and you are in a more sponge-like absorbent phase. So then it matters even more the quality because the more inputs you have and the higher quality, that's going to make it worth your while. But when you are in a phase of needing to create, create, create, create, you need to reduce your inputs so that there is more energy to be given to the outputs and you're not being cluttered by information from the world.

Okay, as we round out today, I want you to think through your daily habits, sleep, nutrition, exercise, and are you positioning yourself, take stock for success or for failure? For instance, if you know that if you got more sleep, you'd be more effective during the day, you know, sleep is a superpower. We talk about that here on the podcast. So if you know you need more sleep, then what do you need to do to put yourself on easy mode to be able to get more sleep? Not on easy mode for your day. Yes, more sleep will make your day go more smoothly. It could be a way to play on easy mode.

But think back a step. It's not about the day. You have to think back, root cause. It's about getting more sleep. So what is it going to take? What could you do to put yourself on easy mode with getting more sleep? And so then it may be setting an alarm to head to bed every night or keeping your phone in the kitchen plugged in instead of by your bed or, or, or, right? There's things that each of us have in our specific set of circumstances. And so then just committing to the one thing.

And the other thing that I will say here that I loved, I talk about a force multiplier and how important force multipliers are. And I do that, especially in Monday Map, we talk about this, by identifying what is the thing that because you did it, it makes everything easier as you move forward. Well, Shane Parrish talks about that as the lead domino. What is the lead domino? What is the thing that if you just tip it the rest takes care of itself?

So that's when you think about sleep or nutrition or exercise or how you handle one of your employees or how you handle your approach to the work that needs to get done. So you always just want to think about what is the lead domino? What is the, we call it force multiplier a lot but what is that thing that if you just do it everything else the way is paved for everything else to be much more likely to be successful.

Alright everybody. Thank you for tuning in today. Thank you for giving yourself some space to think about positioning and how you position yourself. Are you playing on easy mode or are you playing on hard mode?

And are you being honest with yourself or have you been honest with yourself up to this point? This is a really great time to be honest. Even if you make zero changes, be more honest about, I'm choosing hard mode. Say that out loud when you are deciding to not delay gratification, when you're deciding to not do the thing that will make tomorrow easier to be successful. Just be honest about it. Because eventually, you'll get sick enough of yourself with it. That's just truly how it works. Eventually, you'll get fed up and you'll think, oh my gosh, for crying out loud, we're just doing it. We're just doing the thing. And then it'll start a new way. And then you can say, I'm playing on easy mode tomorrow. That is a shift. And you'll probably do that more of the time.

Okay. The last thing I want to share here is an example that Shane Parrish gave that I thought was such a solid illustration of how this stuff stacks and how it works. He told the story of his son coming home and handing Shane a test. And he shrugged his shoulders as he walked past and he said, “I did my best.” And Shane looks down at the test, sees the grade, which was not up to his standards. And he also knew that talking to him in that moment probably wasn't the right thing to do.

But later that night, he sat down with him and he asked him, “What does it mean to do your best?” And his son told him that he looked at all the questions, he looked at all the points, he kept checking the time to make sure he could do all this in time, he answered the questions the best he could. And Shane was saying, “It's not that I don't believe him, I do believe him. But what he didn't know and what a lot of adults do not appreciate is that he was playing on hard mode.”

So what Shane did was ask him to rewind 72 hours. Did he study? No. Did he sleep well? No, because he started studying the night before at 10:30 p.m. And stayed up past midnight. Did he eat a healthy breakfast? No, because he slept in from staying up too late. And he also got into a fight with his brother because he got up late. And then they were both trying to get in the shower at the same time.

So Shane took the opportunity to show his son, you were playing on hard mode. You knew you had a test. You knew how to prepare. You knew what was within your control. You chose not to put yourself in the best position possible. And we all do this to ourselves in different ways.

It's time to wake up to where we're doing that and say out loud that we chose hard mode. And do that until you're ready to say that you're going to choose easy mode. But don't lie to yourself and say that you can't or you don't have time or whatever. When you do what's in your control, you put yourself on easy mode.

Alright everybody, I hope you have a wonderful week. I'll see you here next Tuesday.

Hey, you may not know this, but there's a free guide for a process I teach called Monday Map/Friday Wrap. If you go to VelocityWork.com, it's all yours. It's about how to plan your time and honor your plans. So, that week over week, more work that moves the needle is getting done in less time. Go to VelocityWork.com to get your free copy.

Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. If you're ready to get clearer on your vision, data, and mindset, then head over to VelocityWork.com where you can plug in to quarterly Strategic Planning, with accountability and coaching in between. This is the work that creates Velocity.